#australian-literature

#australian-literature

New biographies and freshly issued retrospectives reexamine the lives and legacies of fashion's biggest names, from archetypical It girl Jane Birkin to the eternally ahead of his time Issey Miyake.

No single musician better represents that contribution and its nearly forgotten history than pianist Sidney Porter. From 1941 until his untimely death in 1970, he cast a 6'8" shadow over Portland's jazz scene as both a performer and nightclub owner. Two months after he died, more than 3,000 people filled the Hoyt Hotel in a 10-hour show of respect that included 20 bands and more than 160 musicians.

Give your tormentors so much sweetness that they develop diabetes. To a girl in her early teens, that sounded like nonsense. I was the centre of the universe. Surely, no one had ever been as badly treated as I was! And here my father was, telling me to be nice to them? I would ask: Is this some turn-the-other-cheek rubbish? My father has quite a distinctive cackle, and I heard it in those moments.

Unrivalled, the next instalment in the Canadian author's Game Changers series, will be released internationally on 29 September, the publisher HarperCollins announced on Tuesday. The wild success of the screen adaptation has driven a level of interest in the books that rivals that of Bridgerton, booksellers have told Guardian Australia, with paperback copies of the first two novels selling out within a day and backorders piling up.

As we have seen, defending the right of people to speak, even when we deeply disagree with them, is very, very difficult. Many people perhaps most can't manage it. It can feel like a betrayal of self, a betrayal of values, and certainly a betrayal of one's community or cause. Nor is it sensible to expect it of everyone. But we must demand it of the custodians of our culture. This is the way forward.

Organizers canceled the 2026 Adelaide Writers' Week festival on Tuesday, after some 180 international and Australian authors withdrew from the event in protest of the scrapping of an appearance by an Australian-Palestinian author and academic. The event's director Louise Adler, the Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, said she was quitting her role on Tuesday, shortly before the festival was called off altogether.

Because, let's face it, creative work does require some form of faith. It is a tumultuous thing to launch an idea into a vast nothingness and hope that it makes a light bright enough to be found by others. Luckily, these luminaries were my light, and I hope they may become yours as well, and - more so - that these snippets lead you to more of their work.